PART ONE

Chapter One

Tod, playing some mysterious jungle game under the grubby laurels and aucubas that hedged the side walk leading to No. 13 Spaniards Row, heard two respectable loiterers passing judgment upon his father.

“That silly fool Western will never make any money.”

Tod was a combative child and very clannish, and he pushed a solid round head through the laurel leaves, and retorted upon these Pentworth financiers.

“Boo! Only a silly fool wants to make money!”

The elder of the two, it was Mr. Joab Twain of Twain’s Stores, turned an enormous and angry face on the child.

“Who’s that?”

“Me,” said Tod.

“The Western brat! Sort of language you’d expect from a little atheist.”

“I’m not a brat,” said Tod, “and three of the eggs Mother bought of you yesterday was rotten.”

He made a rapid, backward retreat through the shrubbery, scrambled over the little, low red-brick wall, descended into the garden, and found his father in his shirt-sleeves preparing to beat the parlour carpet.

Tod flew at him and then stopped dead, solemn as a professor of political economy.

“I say, Daddy——”

“My son——?”

“Jus’ heard ol’ Twain say you was a silly fool and couldn’t make money.”

Western threw up his head and laughed.

“It’s true—confound him. We haven’t the penny-three-farthing soul, Tod, my boy. Come on and beat carpets.”

If ever a child loved his father, and had good cause to love him, that child was Tod Western. In later years he never lost the very vivid memory of the man, the memory that many such incidents had left him, glimpsing him in the mirror of a boy’s devoted hero worship, a tall man with a Spanish air, head up, black hair waved back, blue eyes a little fierce and ironical. The old velvet coat, soft shirt and collar, cherry coloured tie, knickers and stockings, were part of the beloved picture. For William Western was an original, in that he had not bowed the knee to the gods of Pentworth town, had refused the black coat and the commercial credo, and dressed himself in the Lincoln green of the merry men of Sherwood. He was generous and he was always short of money. He had the mischievous and affectionate heart of a boy, and a genius for getting the last drop of happiness out of the simplest things of life. Smugness and the dull materialism of Pentworth bored him, but he was never conquered by them. Tod could remember occasional strange rages, times when that boy father of his seemed to mount a big horse and go galloping around and flashing a sword at queer, intangible beasts of slime and shadow. Then he would come down off that horse and laugh, kiss Tod’s mother, and perhaps chase Tod round the garden.

There were two whacking the dust of that parlour carpet. William Western using a hollystick, Tod a little bamboo cane, when Tod leant forward on all fours, regarding a frayed patch in front of him.

“Here’s where your chair has the fidgets, Daddy.”

“Get’s excited, does it? ‘Wish this chap wouldn’t talk so much—and such tosh!’ It’s a respectable, middle-class chair, Tod, and likes comfortable sermons on a Sunday before the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”

“My chair fidgets a bit,” said Tod.

“There are signs of it elsewhere, my boy.”

Then the other voice chimed in:

“Oh, Tod, where did you do that?”

Tod twisted round to face his mother—mother with the gold brown hair and eyes that were so calm and yet always ready to smile.

“Done what, Mummy?”

“Frayed your particular bit of carpet, my son,” said his father.

Tod ran a tentative hand over a certain portion of his figure.

“Yes, that’s a fragment of shirt, my child.”

“Must have happened sliding down the wall by the church steps,” said Tod, very solemn.

“Oh, Tod!” said his mother.

Tod got up and kissed her.

“Couldn’t you put in a nice bit of leavver, Mummy? I’m so sorry.”

Western struck the carpet a resounding smack.

“That’s what a wanton destruction of good shoddy deserves! Great Jehovah, I’ve forgotten to develop Miss Trilby’s plates!”

“I’ve done it, Will,” said his wife with a mother smile.

Western arose and imitated his son.

“There never was anyone like your mother, Tod,” he confessed.

No man knew better than William Western that it was his wife who had held the gates and walls of this Château Gaillard of a home.

Western’s Photographic Studio was the only temple of its kind in Pentworth town, and Western was a most irresponsible and autocratic priest. The shop had been built in front of one of the little old red houses in Spaniards Row, and its two bulging bow-windows with the white door in between looked like a pair of high-powered spectacles perched on the blunt nose of Western’s house. Tod’s father had a reckless sense of humour. He could take a good picture, if the subject pleased him; he loved children and would spend an hour playing with some shy child till he had surprised it in a moment of naturalness. The adults of Pentworth gave him no such romantic possibilities, and he did not ask for them.

“Jam ’em in chairs up against a bit of rockery. That’s all that’s wanted. See they’ve got their cuffs down and their gold chains showing.”

And that was all he did. He plastered his walls and windows with the obviousness of Pentworth, its staring stolidity, its bony head and bucolic gawkishness, its absurd Sabbath clothes all put on for the occasion. There were various mayors of Pentworth in robes and chains; family groups looking thoroughly stiff and uncomfortable; girls sitting in the same Louis Quinze chair with young men posed rather sheepishly behind them; other young men trying to look negligent and at ease while perched on a flat-topped bit of rustic furniture; old ladies with dogs and cats, and their laps and bosoms very much in the foreground; young women who simpered or looked sternly stolid; boys with cricket bats; brides and bridegrooms who did not seem quite sure whether they belonged to each other.

“Slap ’em up against a bit of rockery. Jam their heads in a vice and let ’em stare. Give ’em something to hold—a prayer book, a Malacca cane, somebody else’s hand—anything. Give ’em something obvious, something they needn’t trouble to understand.”

Now and again he caught a temperament, a face, a naturalness that piqued him, and then he made a picture of it, and would spoil a dozen plates in the adventure. Perhaps it was a little country girl with something of the Tess about her, or a sailorman who had forgotten to worry about being respectable, or an old shepherd who lived with his sheep and the weather. He painted pictures too, rather wild water-colours of marsh, and downlands, and mysterious thundercloud smitten woods. They hung in the studio, but nobody ever bought them. He also catalogued himself as a painter of miniatures, and he had painted several of his wife, and one of Tod. Miss Timperley of Gore Hall had once given him a commission and had then accused him of making her squint.

“But you do squint, madam,” he had said in self-defence.

Such sincerity is not made for this world.

The house in Spaniards Row held the heart of Tod’s childhood. It was a queer house, a Puck’s palace that played tricks on you and always got the best of the game. The front of it was all red, the back all white, but it did not deign to be divided so dogmatically. It had queer gables, juttings out of odd wings and outhouses, little brick excrescences, unexpected chimneys, windows that winked at you goblin fashion. There were two back doors, a side door and a front door, all painted a blurred bluish green. No. 13 delighted in little yards and passages, and funny poky outhouses and cellars that just existed on mystery and did nothing for a living. There was a pump, a rain-water cistern that suggested all sorts of subterranean and watery horrors if you lifted the stone slab; a brick baking-oven fit to hold forty thieves; a coal-cellar that any decent dragon might have coveted. The interior of the house was just as mysterious and unexpected. It was full of passages and cupboards and odd bits of staircase, and every room had a different mood. The shabby old furniture that Nancy Western had brought with her marriage, the white chintz curtains, faded rose-bud wall-papers, were part of the same picture. Tod used to play at Bogey by hiding in the oak chest on the landing, or he would barricade the attic stairs with a couple of old trunks, a derelict towel-horse, and an assortment of cardboard boxes, and await attack by his father. His father would advance up the stairs with the fur rug from the parlour over his head and shoulders, and armed with a battered dish-cover and rolling pin. Tod held the stairs with paper darts and a curtain pole. There would be great excursions, shouts, battle cries, clashing of dish-cover and curtain pole, and some disorganisation of the lumber forming the barricade.

“I’m King Borrabarroo, the terrible—terrible sabbige, Wahoo, Borrabarroo! I smell the blood of Tod—the Englishman.”

“I’m Tod, the giant-killer. I’ve cut off the heads of ten sabbiges, and I’ve killed hundreds of Frenchmen.”

Sometimes the fort was stormed, but King Borrabarroo never survived the adventure.

Then there were those rambling pilgrimages afield, when Tod learnt about wild birds, and trees, and flowers. There were half days in the Pentworth woods, and Tod could remember spending one whole night under the stars, cuddling close up to his father, with Western’s old brown mackintosh drawn over him beside a gipsy fire.

Mummy had looked rather grave next day.

“Will, you shouldn’t!”

“It was dry as a haystack, dear. And we had a fire to frighten the bears and wolves. Hadn’t we, Tod?”

“And we cooked pertaters in it, Mummy.”

Nancy Western had kissed both her savages and fed them on tea and boiled eggs.

It was not given to the Tod of those days to understand the beloved soul of his mother. Finance did not affect him and if there were worries at No. 13 Spaniards Row, they were not clouds to the child. Nancy Western was a happy woman. Her irresponsible, lovable boy of a man was worth the little contriving frowns that his originalities sometimes placed upon her forehead. She was his mother and his mistress and his wife. She managed his house, performed miracles with his money, made good his casual attitude towards the commercial part of Pentworth, and yet kept him as a lover. Western was no fool, but a very human and wise rebel. He knew what life had given him in his wife’s shining eyes, and her soft, full-hearted laughter. He knew that she had had every right to be exasperated—how much she forgave, and how greatly he loved her for that smiling, understanding, human soul of hers. She was Romance, and had never ceased to be Romance, and his home had never been sordid.

Tod had glimpses of his father as a lover. Those summer Sundays were the great days. The picnic basket would be packed the night before, and they would catch the train that always started so adventurously and inconveniently early and landed them at Yerrow or Wivelsea in time for a second breakfast. There were sea days and woodland days, days on the chalk hills with lunch and tea under some windblown thorn. Sometimes it rained, but Western was a genius with a couple of mackintoshes and an umbrella, and life was always a bit of Crusoe’s island. Tod noticed that his mother laughed more, and looked pinker, and brighter about the eyes on those days. She wore her pretty frocks—the white frock with the pink ribbons, or the green one edged with white. Most of the time Tod’s father had an arm round her, or he was sitting so that he could touch her or give a playful tweak to the hair. Tod remembered a day in the Yerrow woods when he had trundled off to look at an ant-hill near the camping ground, and had come back to find his mother in his father’s arms and being kissed, as he—Tod—was never kissed. Tod had sneaked off again, and spent half an hour stirring up the ant-heap with a stick.

Six days out of seven Mummy was cooking, or cleaning, or mending clothes, or shut up in that funny little dark-room where Daddy messed about with bottles and dishes and things. Tod never remembered seeing her out of temper, except on one of those Saturday afternoons when Uncle Remus drove over from Lydhurst. Tod came on them in the garden, down by the three old apple trees, and his mother was very white and Uncle Remus very red.

“Never dare to say that to me again.”

“You needn’t flare out like that, Nan. There’s no denying that Will’s a poor hand at business.”

“I didn’t marry him for that, did I? He’s the best man in the world, and he has made me happy.”

Tod did not like Uncle Remus. He was long and meagre, with a figure that had concavities where bulges should have been. He had weak, shifty eyes, a fringe of grey hair, a neck like a turkey’s and a wonderful blue and everted lower lip. That lip used to fascinate Tod, especially when Uncle Remus ate peas with a knife.

“Doesn’t it get cut, Uncle?”

“Get cut, boy? What?”

“Your lip.”

Uncle Remus made some sort of remark about a strap and its uses.

He was a farmer, pretty well-to-do, and he wore a hard felt hat, green with age, and black clothes that looked rusty. The last thing Uncle Remus ever did was to part with money. He avoided the sacrifice, dodged it, walked round it, ignored it unless it was too obviously part of the day’s business. Never once did Tod get a sixpence out of him, and Uncle Remus got nothing out of Tod. He thought him a bold and cheeky little beast, and Tod christened his uncle “Old-bug-in-the-Bed,” though how he had come by the phrase no one ever knew! His father roared when he first heard it; his mother went red, began a reproof, and then laughed like her husband.

Even at the age of seven Tod had some understanding of his father’s attitude towards the world of Pentworth town. Pentworth thought William Western an eccentric fool; it also disliked him, because it had an unpleasant suspicion that Western managed to laugh at Pentworth’s opinion. When you have labelled a man as a fool, it is most improper for him to turn round and laugh at you. There had been occasions, of which Tod, of course, knew nothing, when his father had got up at public meetings and said the most ironical, scathing and truthful things with a happy smile on his face. Pentworth, especially the commercial part of Pentworth, did not like that sort of man. He was an uncomfortable neighbour, the kind of person who upsets the middle-class “Christian,” who talked about money-changers and scourages, and who reminded fat people that their God’s feet had been washed by a harlot.

That his father was at war with Pentworth Tod guessed quite shrewdly, but the spiritual inspiration of the feud was beyond the grasp of the child.

Tod remembered quite a number of Western’s queer sayings, and they stuck in his memory, to be pulled out and used in after years.

“I’m not a penny-in-the-slot machine.”

“Christ was born before the commercial traveller.”

“Black-coated, slimy slaves!”

“Up with Ruskin, down with the robbers.”

“You never need fear playing dirty tricks so long as you keep them out of the newspapers.”

“This country with a penny-three-farthing soul.”

Chapter Two

Tod had been out stalking imaginary tigers in a jungle growth of runner beans, artichokes and gooseberry bushes, his weapon the deadly spring-gun that would eject a mild pea at a velocity calculated to make a dog think that a fly had tickled him. It was growing dark, and Tod had tracked an elephant out of the artichoke forest. The tracks led Tod to the brick wall and the front shrubbery, that most dismal and dangerous spot in all Pentworth, where a boy had to be infinitely daring and infinitely cautious or lose his life. Tod’s boa-constrictor lived in the shrubbery, and fed upon the various Pentworth worthies whom Tod’s imagination consigned to it. The Rector of St. Jude’s, Mr. Joab Twain, the Police Inspector, old Mrs. Clutterbuck who kept the sweet shop, had all been devoured by the great snake. Tod’s father had pretended to wonder what the snake could have done with Mrs. Clutterbuck’s boots and the Police Inspector’s buttons.

Tod had his head above the wall when the two men came out of the house and stood talking in the alley-way between the railings and the shrubs. One of the men was Tod’s father, the other a rather wild-eyed, hunted looking little man who kept a bootshop, and whose name was Mr. Jacks. The street lamp had been lit, and Tod could see that Mr. Jacks was strangely excited. He held his hat in one hand, and a long black forelock had fallen over his forehead, and he stammered slightly when he talked.

Tod’s father had taken some white things out of his pocket, bits of white paper that crinkled.

“It’s made to be used, old man.”

Tod’s father handed the white things to Mr. Jacks, and Mr. Jacks seemed extraordinarily upset about something. He pocketed the paper, grabbed at Western’s hand, and made funny noises in his throat.

“God bless you, Western. God bless you.”

Tod saw him cram his hat on his head and make a dash for the street. Western re-entered the house.

Tod forgot the boa-constrictor, scuttled back, and went in by the garden door. His father had just strolled into the parlour where his wife was laying the table for supper. Tod hung back in the hall and listened.

“Poor Jacks,” said his mother.

“Poor devil! Such a good chap, and so fond of those kiddies. What an accursed and sordid slaving this commercialism of ours can be!”

“Did you help him?”

“Yes”

“Much?”

“Ten pounds,” said Tod’s father laconically.

Tod saw his mother’s blue eyes look at his father with a moment’s tragic dismay.

“Oh, Will!”

“I had to, dear. The poor beggar was so——”

Tod’s mother came quickly round the table and kissed Tod’s father.

“You dear? I didn’t mean——”

Western caught his wife’s hands and held them against his mouth.

“No wonder I’m always in love with you, Nan.”

No. 13 Spaniards Row had its periodic financial crisis, and Western’s generosity to Mr. Jacks inaugurated a season of lean months. Tod noticed various things. His father spent more time in the studio and in the dark room, and even consented to paint the portrait of Miss Glandinning’s fat fox-terrier. The daily glass of beer disappeared from the dinner table. Margarine replaced butter, and jam and margarine were not allowed to meet on the same piece of bread. The Sunday excursions were cut down to two a month, and Tod had to wait for a new summer suit. Yet Château Gaillard held out bravely and lost none of its happy good temper. His mother sang or whistled softly while she worked, and she found time to give Tod his lessons. Western had bought an old bicycle and was touring the country, taking pictures of Heddingly Castle and Bramber Abbey, “Sunset on Downs” and “Dawn over the Weald.” He had ideas about developing the picture postcard trade. It was a little less obvious and boring than photographing Pentworth in its Sunday clothes.

About that time a Mr. Hogg obtruded himself on Tod’s notice. He was a square, red-faced man who walked with his feet set rather wide apart and his toes turned in, rather like a duck. He had little, alert, evil eyes, and a nose like the nose of one of those indiarubber faces that you can flatten as you please. The young animal in Tod did not like the smell of the man. Mr. Hogg was always turning up when Tod’s father was away, and hanging about in the shop or the studio, making googly eyes at Tod’s mother.

One autumn evening, just about dusk, Tod heard his mother calling him.

“Tod—Tod——”

Tod was in the garden, and there was a cry in his mother’s voice that made him race for the house. He found her in the parlour, lighting a candle with hands that shook a little; something black and heavy and straight lay on the table. But Tod’s mother was not alone. A man seemed to have fallen over one of the rush-bottomed chairs; he was picking himself up, and as his head appeared Tod saw that his forehead was all bloody. But it was his mother’s face that astonished and bewildered Tod. She was angry, with an anger that was new to the child; her face was all stark and white and blazing, and her eyes looked like two bits of shining glass.

“This man has insulted your mother, Tod. Never forget it.”

Then Tod’s father appeared out of the sudden dusk, like Ulysses from out of the sea.

“Hallo, what’s this, Nan?”

“We owe this man money, Will. He has got to be paid.”

“Of course, he’ll be paid.”

Tod’s mother blazed at them both.

“To-night, at once—now! He came here and asked me to pay him with—myself. Tod, dear—come to me.”

Tod saw his mother’s anger leap to his father and set him afire. He had never glimpsed his father like that before, and it made him afraid. He ran to his mother, and was caught up and carried out of the room.

The affair ended there, so far as Tod was concerned. He heard strange noises in the house, a voice that howled, the sound of heavy blows. The street door banged. Then there was silence.

Tod’s father had lit the lamp when Tod and his mother returned to the parlour. A broken chair lay in a corner, and the cloth had been dragged from the table. Western was whistling softly. Tod saw his eyes light up strangely directly his mother entered the room.

“That was all my fault, Nan. And, by God, I shan’t forget it.”

Tod felt rather forgotten for a moment. His mother was weeping, and Tod’s father was saying all manner of strange things, and holding her as though he never meant to let her go again. Tod noticed that the knuckles of his father’s right hand were all red and raw.

“Now, what about supper? Sit down, dearest. Come along, Tod, my man; we’ll lay the table.”

In the pantry Tod asked his father a question.

“What did the man say to Mother, Daddy?”

“I hope you will never know, my boy. Now then, hand out the bread from that pan.”

Various familiar pieces of furniture disappeared from No. 13 Spaniards Row during the next two weeks. The oak chest on the landing was carried away by two men in dirty white aprons, and placed in a cart. The grand father clock went with it, looking very moon-faced and melancholy and ready to break into tears. Tod lost his temper over the rape of the poor grandfather clock, and challenged the two men.

“What are you doin’ with our furniture?”

“You go and ask that respec’ble father of yours, cocky,” said one of the men roughly.

Tod glared at him.

“Your teeth’s all black,” he retorted, “why don’t you clean ’em like a gentleman?”

His mother looked rather sad for two days, but Tod noticed that his father was very loving with her, and could hardly bear her out of sight. Tod’s father had all sorts of pet names for his mother, and some of the names seemed to come out of the Bible—at least Tod thought so. His mother’s eyes would grow all strange and deep and shimmery when Tod’s father called her by these names: Sometimes she would answer him with, “You dear old Quixote,” and Tod tried to find out what a Quixote was.

He asked Mrs. Clutterbuck at the sweet shop, the lady who had been devoured by the imaginary snake, but Mrs. Clutterbuck did not help him.

“Aven’t got any. We don’t stock it.”

Which was a subtle and innocent gibe at the psychology of Pentworth.

The first tragedy of Tod’s life followed swiftly upon the brown heels of the autumn. Western, pedalling that old bicycle of his down Castle Hill, collided at the crossroads with Pentworth’s latest mechanical sensation, the motor-car from Pavitt’s Brewery. William Western was rushed home to Spaniards Row in the car that had smashed him, and that night he lay in the long, low room that overlooked the street, dying. Tod had not seen him. The dazed and uncomprehending child had been seized on by Mr. Jacks and carried off to that gentleman’s bootshop. Mr. Jacks seemed very upset about something, and kept pulling that forelock of his and uttering strange blasphemies. He stodged Tod with sweets, and talked all sorts of comforting and mendacious nonsense to the child.

“Yes, Daddy’s all right. See him to-night, Tod, old man. Best man in the world your daddy; best chap that ever was.”

About seven o’clock somebody rang Mr. Jacks’ bell, and Mr. Jacks went to answer it.

“Western wants to see his boy,” said a voice.

“I’ll bring him myself,” said the keeper of the bootshop.

Tod did not realise what was happening to the life of No. 13 Spaniards Row. Mr. Jacks held his hand and appeared unable to speak coherently when he delivered Tod to his mother. Nancy Western bent down and kissed Tod, and her mouth felt very cold. Her eyes had a strange look, as though they were frozen, and her face was all stiff and expressionless. Tod did not understand how great and piteous his mother’s courage was.

She took Tod to his father, and Tod was a little frightened. His father’s face was the colour of linen, and the big eyes all big and misty. He lay with the clothes turned back off his chest, and just breathed and looked, and there was a queer spasm in his breathing.

“Oh, Daddy!”

His mother held him back.

“You must be very quiet, dear. Sit down. Daddy wants to talk.”

The dying man’s eyes were all anguish and tenderness.

“Let him kiss me, Nan.”

Tod kissed his father, and Western spoke to him in a small and husky voice.

“Take care of Mummy, Tod; there never was such a mother as Mummy. She’s been the Faery Queen to me. I’m going away on a long journey, Tod, and you’ve got to be a man.”

Tod choked a little.

“I’ll look after Mummy till you come back, Daddy.”

“Nan, I can’t bear it,” said Tod’s father, and Mother took Tod away.

Mr. Jacks was waiting, and trying to light a pipe that kept going out.

“Will you keep him to-night?”

“Anything,” said Mr. Jacks; “much better if it had been me. Silly sort of world, anyway. Tod, ol’ man; let’s go and have some toffee.”

“I can see Daddy in the morning,” said Tod.

“Yes, dear.”

Mr. Jacks carried him off, seeing that Tod’s mother was breaking, and that her thoughts were with her man.

Tod would eat neither sweets nor supper that night, and sat in the shopkeeper’s own chair, asking interminable questions. “Where’s Daddy going? Will he be away long? What’s Daddy in bed for? Has he broken his leg? What’ll they do to the man who did it?” Mr. Jacks had always known himself to be a coward, but he felt more afraid of hurting that child than he had feared anything in his life before. Little Tod Western would have to be told the truth, and Mr. Jacks saw himself breaking the news to the boy.

Tod fell asleep at last in the arm-chair, and Mr. Jacks spent the night on the hard and shining black sofa, dozing off and waking with a start, to find the child still sleeping. It was one of the longest nights of the man’s life. He crept out of the room before daylight, and pottered about in the kitchen, lighting the fire and getting breakfast ready. About seven someone rang the bell, and Mr. Jacks went to the side door.

“Mr. Western’s dead,” said a voice.

“Is he?” said Mr. Jacks blankly.

“Mrs. Western wants you to tell the boy.”

“Damn,” said Mr. Jacks. “Yes, I’ll do it.”

He kept Tod in the sitting-room, and his own children in the kitchen. Tod ate quite a good breakfast, and Mr. Jacks gave him buttered toast, sardines, and an egg. Tod kept asking when he might go and see his father, and old Jacks, seizing the desperate courage of a tender-hearted man, lit a pipe and dragged Tod on to his knee.

“Tod, ol’ man—damn this pipe! The smoke gets into a chap’s eyes. Tod, ol’ man, your father has gone away.”

“Gone away? Where’s he gone to?”

“Heaven, Tod, ol’ man. And you’ll go there some day and see him.”

The child’s eyes were round and staring. He did not speak for a moment, and then he clutched one of Jacks’ hands.

“Daddy’s dead!”

“Yes, dear; he’s gone to heaven.”

Before Mr. Jacks could grapple the crisis, the child was off his knee and out of the door.

“Tod, ol’ man, Tod——”

But the boy did not heed him. The street door stood open at the end of the passage, and Tod dashed out into the misty November sunlight, a strangely silent child with the face of an old man. Mr. Jacks faltered at the street door.

“He’s gone to his mother,” he said to himself; “she’ll want him.”

But Tod had not gone to his mother. He ran out of the town and down the hill to the meadows along the river. The grass was all wet and grizzled with early frost, and the great elms were dropping their yellow leaves to a light breeze. And Tod ran wild along those meadows, silent no longer, but wailing and calling his father. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. Come back, Daddy, oh, come back.” His child’s anguish seemed tireless and unending, and even when the movement of grief ebbed in him, he lay on the wet grass under an elm tree and sobbed.

Tod remained lost all that day, but about dusk someone saw him toddling like a little ghost up the lane to Spaniards Row. He went in by the garden door, and there were no lights in the house. His hands fumbled at the door of the parlour and opened it, almost without a sound.

Someone was sitting by the window, a shadowy figure, with a white face. It was Tod’s mother, and she was alone, and of a sudden Tod’s little heart went out to her like a bird to its mate.

“Mummy!”

“Tod!”

He ran to her, and was caught in her arms. She asked no questions, but held him to her and kissed him again and again. Her tears were on his face, and her breath came in great gasps. Tod had never been kissed in such a way before. Somehow it made him think of that day in the Yerrow woods when he had seen his father kissing his mother like that. Strange, passionate kisses, beyond the soul of a child.

“Mummy!”

Her broken words fell on him like her tears.

“His boy! You are him. O God, how can I bear it!”

Chapter Three

A week after William Western’s death, an old lady took up her abode in the kitchen, and Tod’s mother went out of it and accepted the responsibilities of the studio and the shop. She had grown familiar with the technique of the business during her husband’s lifetime, and a neat little notice posted up in the window warned Pentworth that it could be photographed as before. Nancy Western had inherited two five hundred pound mortgages which gave her forty pounds a year. She meant to make a fight of it in Pentworth for the sake of her boy, and not to be pushed off the narrow shelf of her commercial opportunity.

Tod would not be parted from his mother those days. He slept in her bed, and more than once he woke at night to find her clasping him and kissing him with passionate tenderness.

“Oh, little Will.”

Tod’s arms clung round her neck.

“I’m a man now, Mummy,” and so he was, in spite of his years.

He had developed a sudden new self-consciousness and a new ideal. He stayed with her in the shop, sat with her in the dark-room, watching and learning with an intense seriousness that helped the broken woman beside him back to her smiles. Mrs. Western was looking very pale and comely and pathetic in her black dress, and other people noticed this, as well as Tod. Quite a considerable part of Pentworth expressed its sympathy by coming to be photographed. Mr. Jacks headed the procession, and the Mayor and Mayoress gave the impulse public recognition.

Nancy Western had as much as she could do. Tod, the child, was challenged and worried. He ran about after her like a dog, but a very intelligent, quick-eyed dog, who soon learnt to fetch and carry. His devotedness overtopped all difficulties. He learnt where every thing was to be found; he brushed out the shop and dusted the shelves and counter, tied up parcels, went on errands, even insisted on being allowed to make solemn, round-handed entries in the ledger and day-book. He began to pick up the technique of the dark-room where his mother worked with the light from the little red lamp shining on her soft hair and pale face. And he developed a quaint and autocratic fatherliness towards her that issued orders and saw them obeyed.

“Mummy must come to dinner.”

And Mummy went.

“Mummy’s eyes are tired. Mummy must come and lie down on the sofa.”

How much his queer and authoritative little tendernesses helped his mother, Tod never guessed. His child’s love stanched the blood-flow of those bitter weeks, and turned her anguish into a duller pain. He made a complete and splendid conquest of old Mrs. Bunce who functioned in the kitchen. She would have let him turn her rolling-pin into a cricket bat, or play football with her Sunday cap.

“That there child’s a marvel,” she announced to her friends; “there must ’ave been a lot of good, somehow, in William Western.”

A year passed away, and Nancy Western was able to look about her and estimate her success. She found that it had been very considerable, so considerable that she was able to pay a young woman to help her in the business, and to send Tod to school. Uncle Remus, who still drove in regularly from Lydhurst, and whose contribution to Nancy’s assistance had been a great deal of pessimistic advice, a few potatoes, and a bundle or two of acid rhubarb, suggested the Grammar School at Marychurch.

“A solid sort o’ school,” he called it; “nothing new-fangled about it. Turn a boy out sensible and solid.”

“And stupid,” added Tod’s mother.

She pointed out to Uncle Remus that the Grammar School at Marychurch meant Tod’s board, and that she could not afford it, and Uncle Remus did not offer to accept any responsibility.

Moreover, Tod absolutely and utterly refused to be parted from his mother, and her heart was with him in his obstinacy. He was such a sturdy, spirited child, she could find no signs of the incipient milksop in him. A Mr. Chipperton conducted a private school in Pentworth, and Nancy Western called on Mr. Chipperton.

He was a tall man of forty or so, with a high bumpy forehead, pince-nez, and an air of vivacious benignity. Mr. Chipperton “conducted” his school; any other method of expressing his mastership would have been vulgar, and Mr. Chipperton was never vulgar. He was a good soul who had concentrated in his person all the ideals and prejudices of middle-class Pentworth, and to whom everything in life was either “nice or nasty,” “proper or improper.” He studied refinement, and kept a rather bleary and mistrustful eye on all girls. Sex scared him to death, made him chatter all sorts of fanatical and pathetic nonsense. Mr. Chipperton was English middle-class prudishness stuck on a stool and wagging a long forefinger. He was a bachelor; Miss Victoria Chipperton, his sister, kept his house and helped him to guard the world’s virtue.

“My dear madam, the note of my school is refinement—refinement, and a religious education. I try to remember, madam, that character comes before the multiplication table. I try to be a father to my boys.”

Nancy Western, judging him by her dead husband, thought Mr. Chipperton an honest but harmless sort of fool. She felt quite capable of looking after Tod’s character; she wanted Mr. Chipperton to educate him, and she said so.

“Certainly, madam, our curriculum is up-to-date in every department. We can give a scientific and commercial training. I am not a bigoted classic.”

“I want him to learn what is sensible and useful.”

“And poetry, madam, music, and lit-er-a-ture?”

“I’ll see to the romance,” said Nancy Western.

So Clarence Todhunter Western trudged daily to Prospect House and sat under Mr. Chipperton and Mr. Chipperton’s two assistant masters. Tod began by being rather shy and solemn, and he seemed to know very little about arithmetic and grammar, and his knowledge of Latin was nil. He was placed in the lowest class, and though he was no Paladin in the class-room, he was a force to be reckoned with in the playground.

“Western, how do you spell pork?”

“Pig’s meat, sir?”

Mr. Chipperton inclined his head in the affirmative.

“P-a-l-k, sir,” said Tod.

The master blinked.

“Very ingenious, Western, but incorrect. Think of fork and not chalk.”

Tod heard about pork in the playground. Little Cocky Walker, that snub-nosed, pallid, supercilious bit of infallibility, selected Tod for the day’s jest.

“Come here, Clarence Todhunter, and spell chalk.”

“C-h-a-l-k,” said Tod.

“Rot. It’s c-h-o-r-k, you cuckoo.”

“I’m not a cuckoo,” said Tod.

“If I say you’re a cuckoo you’re a cuckoo.”

“Then you’ll say it the other way round.”

And Tod closed with Master Walker, and after rollings and contortions that lasted three minutes, remained triumphantly uppermost, holding the infallible one’s face hard against the gravel.

“Say ‘Western’s not a cuckoo.’ ”

Further contact with the gravel persuaded Master Walker that it would be wiser to propitiate Tod.

Tod let him up.

“Cocky’s licked at last,” said one of the interested crowd, and Tod’s imaginative spelling ceased to be a subject for public criticism.

Prospect House was a very ordinary school with the usual class-rooms and the lifeless uninspired routine. The natural curiosity of the child did not survive in that pot-shop where all the pots were alike and filled with the same stodge. One or two boys remained keen, and followed Mr. Chipperton into the wilds of algebra, and found adventurous delights in Latin grammar. Nine-tenths of the school were bored, and determined to avoid learning anything that could be safely left unlearnt. So long as you could steer safely past “impots” and a whacking, what did it matter?

Tod, too, was bored, and it was his first experience of boredom. He did not understand it, and he was inclined to blame himself. The great fact that weighed with him was that his mother had sent him to this school to learn, and she was paying money for it, and he decided that it was his business to learn. He fought his boredom as though it were a deadly sin, and Mr. Jukes the junior master began to appreciate Tod.

Mr. Chipperton was an innocent and unconscious dispeller of ennui. He was the serious, impressive, dramatic clown, and the little devils mocked him. Mr. Chipperton was something of a poser, but he did not pose effectively.

“You must lead boys; you must be a boy with boys,” such were his inspirations.

He played cricket with the school, going out in baggy grey flannel trousers, a white shirt, and an absurd little red and black striped cap that refused to sit down decently on his bald head. He was very energetic and conversational in the field, but he let most of the balls through and muffed nearly all his catches. The school hung on the edge of giggles when he was batting. He sweated, and poked and flourished, and was generally bowled in the second over by some quite futile googly.

Then there were those “Christian evenings” on Fridays in the big schoolroom. Tod attended on several occasions until he disgraced himself by laughing, and was severely admonished by Miss Chipperton.

The process never seemed to vary. Mr. Chipperton would seat himself on the music-stool, lift the lid of the keyboard, and let his fingers patter over the keys. There were mice in the piano—perennial mice.

Mr. Chipperton’s handkerchief would come out.

“Dear me, nasty little animals!”

He would wipe the notes excitedly.

“Haven’t we got a cat, my dear? Disgusting little animals. Now, boys, ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’——”

Tod grew in stature and in understanding that summer, and came by a new and rather disturbing knowledge of the great facts of life. In spite of Mr. Chipperton Tod discovered sex, and it was uncovered to him nastily—by a member of a clique of dirty little boys who had wriggled behind the mock curtain with which the English middle-class drapes the mystery.

Tod was horrified, disgusted, incredulous, because these urchins dragged his parents into the squabble, and attacked him through his mother.

“You go and ask your ma how you were born.”

“I will,” said Tod.

And he did.

It was one of the moments of anguish in Nancy Western’s life, for the boy came to her shrinkingly, his eyes asking to be given a convincing picture of the old fairy tale. He had been shocked, and his mother had to shock him a second time; nor need it have happened, and Tod’s mother blamed herself. Had she been thoughtless or a coward?

“God did give me to you, didn’t he, Mummy?”

“Yes, dear.”

“How did I come, then?”

It was dusk, and she drew Tod to the sofa and, feeling her face like fire, told him the truth. She had to tell him; she knew now that she ought to have told him before. The nastiness should never have been. It was England, the old England of the “little Bethels.”

The child shrank from her a little, and she felt his shrinking in every fibre of her woman’s soul. It could not end there, and she stripped her love and her courage to the child, and fought to regain the glamour of the lost fairy tale. She told him the whole story, simply, a little tragically, describing the long waiting, the pain, the joy. Truth and emotion will always touch and convince a child.

In the end the boy’s arms were round her neck.

“Oh, Mummy, Mummy, what a lot of pain I gave you.”

She had won.

One of the backyard clique challenged Tod in the playground next morning. He was an unwholesome, spotty boy of the name of Blimmer.

“Hallo, Western, did you ask your mother?”

Tod went very white.

“Don’t you speak of my mother; she’s an angel.”

“Shucks,” said the other.

And then Tod flew at him and with such a fury that its fierceness impressed itself on all the boys who saw that fight.

Blimmer was bigger than Tod, but he was flabby, and the smaller boy’s fury scared him. Even when he flinched and tried to edge away, Tod followed him with relentless, hammering fists. It ended with Blimmer lying face downwards on the ground, snivelling, to be rescued by Mr. Chipperton who stalked with jerky solemnity across the playground, and pulled Tod off by the collar.

“For shame, Western.”

Tod blazed at the master.

“Then he shouldn’t speak of my mother. I’ll kill him another time.”

From that day all the decent boys loved Tod dearly.

Coincidences gathered to thrust a more intimate conception of the great mystery upon the boy. He overheard things, casual bits of gossip, words that passed perhaps between Mrs. Bunce and her friends.

“Pretty Mrs. Western.”

They called his mother that. Yes, of course she was pretty.

“She ought to marry again.”

“There’s gents who’re ready to ask her.”

And then the figures of Mr. Plumpton and Mr. Parfit loomed up over Tod, and threw their heavy, black-coated shadows across his life.

Mr. Parfit was a decent little man with a brisk and nervous manner. He was very black and sallow, had very small hands and feet, a hollow chest and high shoulders. His obvious niceness did not recommend him to anybody who was easily bored. He was very polite to Tod, and even brought lumps of sugar for Tod’s latest friend, Gruff, a mongrel terrier. Mr. Parfit appeared to be intensely interested in artistic photography, but Tod soon realised Mr. Parfit wanted his mother.

Mr. Plumpton was a very different sort of creature. He kept the grocery shop in Stone Street, and was big and clumsy and domineering. He had a fine, egg-coloured moustache that spread and drooped like the wings of a swallow tail butterfly. When he looked at you his swollen blue eyes seemed to be saying, “We make no allowance for broken eggs.” Tod had heard his scolding in the shop, and seen him turn with sudden shining and sweating urbanity to serve someone who was worth while.

“Gooday, madam, be-ootiful weather; and what can we do for you to-day, madam?”

Mr. Plumpton was a widower and he had a family of his own, half a dozen cheese-faced children with loud voices and hard eyes. The grocer may have wanted someone to manage his house—anyway he began to bulk big round about No. 13 Spaniards Row, and to make love to Tod’s mother. The bigger he bulked, the more Tod hated him, and the less he saw of Mr. Parfit. Mr. Parfit was crowded out and became a negligible shadow.

Tod had never hated anything as he hated Mr. Percy Plumpton.

“Hallo, Clarence; learnt to spell yet?”

He tried to be jocular and friendly in an arrogant sort of way. The boy had to be humoured, but Tod remained glumy and farouche.

“We’ll cure you of that—some day,” said Mr. Plumpton to himself.

The man was a mountain of self complacency, a strongly sexed beast who had had his way with women. There was something greasy and unclean about him, as though he was always hot and never washed. But Tod hated him most for the way he looked at his mother; she might have been something he wanted to eat.

Tod noticed that his mother remained quite calm and quiet when Mr. Plumpton was talking to her. She did not seem to be in the least afraid of him; she treated him just like other people.

Tod was worried, bewildered, frightened. He had moments of anguish, moments when he yearned to rush at his mother and cry, “O, Mummy, Mummy, don’t.”

His mother puzzled him. Mr. Plumpton might have been an old woman in a black bonnet for all the change he wrought in her. She had the same soft laugh; the same steady, tender eyes; the same pale quick-coloured prettiness. Tod realised of a sudden how pretty his mother was, far prettier than Mrs. Coghurst of the Brewery, and Mrs. Coghurst was supposed to be Pentworth’s Astarte. Tod grew almost afraid of his mother’s prettiness. He saw Mr. Plumpton’s big red hands making a grab at her, and the vision filled him with sensitive horror.

Tod grew reserved and shy those days. He kept apart, thought a great deal about his father, and was often in that corner of the churchyard where William Western lay buried. His hatred of Mr. Plumpton was a great cloud over his life, a cloud that threatened to burst.

And burst it did, and the dog Gruff was the cause of the deluge.

It appeared that Mr. Plumpton had invited himself to tea. He came swelling in, making the floor boards creak, and with his usual complacent clumsiness, trod on Gruff’s tail. Now Gruff was a quick-tempered dog, and his teeth tried the texture of Mr. Plumpton’s grey Sunday trousers.

“Damn the dog!”

Next moment a fat leg swung out and a big boot sent Gruff head over heels into the corner.

Tod lost his whole soul at that. He went at the big man like a little white-faced fury, kicking and hitting, and his kicks hurt.

“Tod, dear!”

“You brat! I’ll teach you manners.”

Mr. Plumpton got Tod by the ear and twisted it with his big fingers, while with the other hand he cuffed Tod’s head.

“If your mother can’t manage you, it’s time——”

Then Nancy Western intervened.

“How dare you touch my boy! How dare you!”

Mr. Plumpton stared at her, but he let go of Tod, who would have rushed in again had not his mother seized him. She was breathing fast, and he could feel her heart thudding, and her eyes were all ablaze.

“You cad! Get out of my house!”

“Well, I’m damned,” said the man, “and I was going to ask you to marry me.”

“You! Marry me!” she laughed. “I knew the honour was to be offered me, and I had to wait to refuse it, hadn’t I? Get out of my house, please.”

And Mr. Plumpton went.

Tod leapt up into his mother’s arms and kissed her.

“You do love me, Mummy?”

“My darling.”

“You won’t give me another daddy?”

She kissed him with passion.

“Never, never, my little Will.”

Chapter Four

It caused no sensation in Pentworth when Clarence Todhunter Western put on trousers, and became the little father of the man he was to be, a sturdy figure, not too long in the leg, and with a close-cropped, squirish and intelligent head. He was a high-spirited, passionate child, with his mother’s colouring and his father’s eyes. He looked at you squarely, and smiling if you pleased him, showing a fine row of strong white teeth. Girls called him a “brown boy,” and thought him rather plain.

Mr. Jacks and Gruff were the only creatures who showed any particular interest in Tod’s trousers.

Mr. Jacks met Tod in Conduit Street, and appeared greatly impressed.

“Well, well, Tod, old man—that’s fine. Funny sort of world anyway. We’ll be old buffers in ten years.”

Mr. Jacks’ simplicity—sharp people called it foolishness—always appealed to Tod. He liked to go fishing and bird-studying with Jacks; they were just boys together; there was no talking up and down about it.

Gruff showed his interest in Tod’s trousers by walking round him and sniffing at them. Gruff seemed to distrust trousers, and the change in Tod disturbed him.

“A sign of incipient and respectable dullness, old man,” said the dog; “you’ll get irritable and kick me some day. Or you’ll be going walks with a thing in a petticoat, and I’ll be gooseberry. O lord!”

There was no burking the fact that Tod discovered Romance ten days after that notable advance in costume, and Romance dawned on him in the blue eyes and yellow hair of “Giggles.”

Tod first saw Miss Millie Hornblower sitting on her father’s garden wall, and eating strawberries out of the hollow of a rhubarb leaf. The brick wall was old and mossy, with a mass of green orchard trees behind it, and a rose or two showing red as fire. The girl was wearing a light blue linen dress, tan shoes, and brown stockings, and her yellow hair was all fluffed out like smoke.

“Hallo, boy.”

“Hallo,” said Tod.

She slipped a strawberry between her restless red lips, tossed her hair, and threw the stalk at Tod. It hit him on the collar and made a little red mark.

“Like one?”

“Thank you.”

“Please.”

She stretched out the leaf, and then drew it back again with a mischievous giggle.

“What’s your name, first.”

“Tod.”

“What a silly name.”

“It’s short for Todhunter,” said the boy.

“Toadhunter? Oh, horrid! Haven’t you got a nicer name than that?”

“Clarence.”

She considered “Clarence,” swinging her legs and looking at him with feline curiosity. The child had a way with her, and a restless, mischievous yet lean sauciness that promised to mature and trouble many men. She was very bold at twelve, mainly because she had not learnt to hide her boldness. Sex cunning and middle-class morality were to teach her that.

Tod had his strawberry, and a chat with Miss Hornblower. The Hornblowers had but lately come to Pentworth, where Mr. Hornblower was in charge of the local management of a coal merchant’s business. It appeared that the Hornblowers had just bought a new drawing-room carpet—a very gorgeous affair; that Dad thought of keeping a pony and trap; and that she—Miss Hornblower—was going to receive piano lessons from the organist of St. Luke’s. Tod accepted all this information with proper awe and interest. Miss Hornblower had a fine appreciation of her social position, and she meant other people to appreciate it also. Humility does not pay in middle-class England, and Millie had absorbed the wisdom of her parents.

“What’s your father?”

“He’s dead,” said Tod.

There was nothing interesting to her in the fact that Tod’s father was dead.

“Where do you live?”

“Number thirteen Spaniards Row. My mother owns the photographic studio.”

“Oh, you keep a shop!” said Miss Hornblower.

Her exclamatory tone challenged him.

“It’s not a shop, but a studio. My dad painted pictures.”

“Did he sell them?” asked the girl.

“He painted ’em for pleasure,” said Tod, lured from the strict truth by her feminine fascinations.

Miss Hornblower offered him another strawberry.

“It’s quite gentlemanly to paint pictures,” she announced. “Where do you go to school?”

“Chipperton’s. Prospect House.”

“I know some of the boys there, Bertie Blimmer and Tom Cassilis.”

Tod felt that he might have serious things to say to Messrs. Blimmer and Cassilis.

That was the beginning of Tod’s first romance, and it occurred in spite of Mr. Chipperton and his mother. The strange part of it was that this boy was inspired to a sensitive and adventurous chivalry by this vain and precocious little chit who had learnt all the elemental tricks of the fully sexed woman. Nature does not intend a man to have ideals, she adapts her sorcery and makes use of these ideals, and in the great game of fooling him nearly all the poets and romancers have blindly and wilfully aided her in her deceit. Tod had taken to reading boy’s tales and romances, and his head was full of wonderful young women who were beautiful as angels, sweet as nectar, gentle as white pigeons, and pure as the forest dew. A boy fought for one of them, suffered for her, rescued her from all sorts of wonderful perils and iniquities, and in the end some good old man blessed them, and they loved each other for ever and ever.

Mr. Chipperton believed in that sort of tale, and in that hypothetical young heroine, but he was a bachelor, and he regarded the actual thing in petticoats with immense and cowardly suspicion. He did not like girls loitering about the playground gate. He approved most thoroughly of the “caterpillar” formation in which Miss Rumble sent her young ladies to take their daily exercise. Mr. Chipperton, that most representative English moralist, having taken up a thoroughly false and artificial position on the sex question, found himself harassed and outmanœuvered, and was always being fooled behind his back. The pity of it all is that these good people teach youth a false and lying philosophy, arm them with brittle and treacherous weapons that are apt to break when the great truths of life put them to the test. The man and the woman who search for sincerity find themselves doomed to re-learn much of mischievous stuff that was taught them in earlier years. They are lucky if the “sugar romance” and the “pretty-pretty-happy-forever-after” school of morals have not already involved them in some sordid and tragic partnership.

Nancy Western might have helped her boy had she had more knowledge of this primitive romance, and had she lived longer. She was a woman—one of the very few women—who had been happily married and had found complete and human satisfaction in her man. The very rich and tender memories of her marriage made her perhaps a little slow in the matter of fearing for her boy. He was a child still, and the man in him seemed a long way off. She did not want to go forward and meet the man in him. She longed to keep him as a boy, hers, unshared by any other feminine thing.

It must be confessed too that Tod’s love for and admiration of his mother sent him off on life’s adventure with the notion that all women were like her. He had all the instinctive chivalry of the clean and healthy boy whose mother had given him a charming and happy childhood. He thought that all girls were like the girls he read of in those books of adventure. Wholesome books no doubt, if life were like that, and a boy were never to become a man. If Nancy Western could have foreseen the future and thought about it, in a thoroughly, un-English, honest, and intelligent way, she might have burnt those books, forgathered with other wise and devoted women and insisted on some new sort of literature for children. She might have realised that English parents do not face the great problems, that they shrink from telling their own boys and girls the truth.

Tod was enslaved by Millie Hornblower’s yellow hair and audacious eyes. He thought her a very wonderful creature, and fit to take her place in any of those romantic books. He haunted Bridge Street and Mill Lane, and was thrilled if he had a glimpse of the lady. He hung about on Sundays and waited to see her go to church, and even had the courage to take off his little bowler hat to Mrs. Hornblower and her daughter.

“Who’s that little boy?”

Tod blushed shamefully. Little boy indeed! When he was in a mood to encounter and to slay dragons.

Pertinacity had its reward. He met Miss Hornblower in Bridge Street one Friday evening; she had been adopting a rather distant and ladylike attitude, and the innocent Tod imagined that he must have offended her.

He pushed his school cap over the back of his head, blushed and stopped.

“Lovely evening.”

“It’s quite a nice evening,” said Miss Hornblower, and giggled.

Then she made that amazing suggestion.

“Let’s go for a walk.”

Tod stepped straight into heaven.

They went down over the bridge and along the path across the river meadows, Tod trying to make gallant and intelligent conversation, and failing abjectly. He wished a mad dog or a tramp or something would attack Millie, so that he could express in wild action what he could not put into words.

“I liked your mother’s dress on Sunday,” he observed, after wondering whether this wonderful creature was interested in dogs.

“Was it a nice dress?”

“Rather. But not half as nice as yours.”

Millie gave him a quick, challenging look.

“Don’t believe you noticed what colour mine was.”

“Yes I did—white with blue bows.”

She patted his shoulder, and Tod wanted to die for her.

“What a shy boy you are!”

“I’m not shy.”

“Yes, you are. You couldn’t say bo! to Mr. Chipperton if he came round that corner.”

“Yes, I could,” said Tod.

And surely enough Mr. Chipperton did stalk round that corner, arms swinging, bumpy forehead rather moist, the serious man taking his serious exercise. He stared at Tod, and threw a disapproving and mistrustful look at Millie.

“Evening, Western.”

“Good evening, sir,” and Tod lifted his cap.

His enchantress showed a sudden haughtiness when Mr. Chipperton had passed.

“I don’t like cowards,” she said.

Tod was grieved, desolated, angry with himself, but not in the least angry with her.

“I couldn’t be rude to him, could I?” he argued. “And old Chips is quite a decent sort.”

“He ought to have taken his hat off to you,” said Miss Hornblower, “when he saw you were walking with a lady.”

She turned back with all the airs of a very superior young woman who had been piqued and offended, and Tod could find nothing to say to her.

She left him in Bridge Street.

“Good night, Mr. Western.”

“Good night,” said Tod, jerking his cap, and thinking that girls were most amazingly sensitive creatures and most easily offended.

Tod was a boy with plenty of sentiment and very little pocket-money, and it never occurred to him that pocket-money could count with so proud and peerless a creature as his lady. The Dorotheas and Lornas and Dianas in the story books never stopped to wonder whether young John Splendid had a shilling with which to buy them cakes and ale. They expected him to be strong and bold and adoring, to loiter under walls and in gardens for a glimpse of them, to treasure gloves and bits of ribbon, to throw flowers and little love letters into their windows, to smite all villains fiercely and repeatedly, to be devoted, sentimental, tender.

Poor Tod followed his new romantic instincts and the teachings of the books. He became the very son of his father, a little Quixote, who made up bunches of roses, and clove pinks and sweet peas, tagged a label to them and then tossed them with fear and trembling over Mr. Hornblower’s garden wall.

“To the most beautiful and lovely Queen of Pentworth.”

“A little token from your loyal and devoted knight and worshipper, Tod Clarence Western.”

“To the noble lady whom I love.”

Also he tried his hand at poetry, and sent fragments of it with flowers.

“Your hair is like the brightest gold,

Your eyes are bluer than the sea.

But why is your sweet heart so cold

When I am sunk in misery?”

This particular appeal fell into the hands of Mr. Hornblower, who happened to be forking potatoes, and who made dreadful fun of it at the tea-table.

“Tell the little gentleman to take a Gregory powder, Millie. Your hair is like the brightest gold, is it? Gosh, he’s got it badly!”

Millie giggled, but she rather liked Tod’s very flattering despair. There were other boys who had fallen under her spell, but they were not so romantic and devoted as Tod. She relented, and allowed Tod an assignation at the gate under the scrubby old laurels at the end of the garden.

Tod was not so eloquent as his flowers or his poetry; he was ever rather a shy boy with girls and women, and this sudden nearness to his princess filled him with awe.

“Awfully good of you to let me come and talk to you,” he said.

“You rather like talking to me, then?” sang the siren.

“It’s music,” said Tod; “and isn’t your hair wonderful?”

She shook it at him.

“Would you like a little bit to keep?”

“Would you give it me?”

“If you’ll swear on your honour.”

“What do you want me to swear?” Tod asked.

“That you’ll never look at any other girl, and that you’ll fight any other boy who wants to talk to me. There’re lots, you know.”

“I’ll do that,” said Tod. “Give me your hand to hold.”

She gave him her hand through the bars of the gate, and Tod removed his cap, knelt down, and made his vow.

“I’ll always love Millie Hornblower,” he declaimed, “and I’ll defend her from all ruffians, dogs and rivals, with all my heart and strength. I’ll be her knight and her servant till I die, please God, Amen.”

With that he kissed her brown little fingers, and got up—blushing.

“You’ll give me the lock of hair now,” he said. “I’ll put it in a little bag and carry it over my heart.”

“I’ll have to get some scissors.”

She slipped away, and Tod stood there in a prayerful and exultant mood, a mood that was suddenly disturbed by the appearance of another boy, a boy with a snub nose and freckles, wearing a disgustingly clean collar, and a silver watch chain displayed across his black waistcoat.

It was Tom Cassilis, a very sulky looking Tom Cassilis, with green jealousy in his eyes.

“Hallo.”

“Hallo,” said Tod, beginning to bristle.

“What’s the joke?” said Master Cassilis.

“What joke?”

“Bet me she’d have you here, and I owe her sixpence. You’re a gooseberry, you loony.”

“It’s a lie,” said Tod.

“Call me a liar.”

“Liar.”

They did not trouble to take off their coats, but plunged into battle like two good paladins fighting for the love of a fair lady. Tod felt a particular rage against Master Cassilis’s clean collar, and the swagger of that silver watch chain. He made haste to ruin both, while Miss Hornblower, returning with a bit of yellow hair wrapped up in a piece of pink tissue paper, watched the fray through the slats of the gate, and felt sweet and good and pleased with her own beauty.

“Oh, you bad boys!”

The boys took no notice of her; they were too busy with each other. Tod had made Master Cassilis’s nose bleed. He closed with his rival and, getting the under hold, threw the other boy and destroyed the last vestiges of vanity that challenged him in the other’s person. Tom Cassilis rolled and kicked, and began pinching, but Tod dropped that by a throttle hold that clinched his victory.

“Say ‘I’m a liar.’ ”

“Shan’t,” gulped Cassilis.

He let Master Cassilis up when that gentleman had recanted.

“It’s my gate,” said Tod. “Don’t you ever come here again, or I’ll thrash you worse.”

The beaten one was on the edge of tears, and Tod felt a sudden pity for him.

“Couldn’t help it, Tom, could I? Shake hands.”

“Shan’t,” blubbered the other boy, walking off, dabbing his bleeding nose with a dirty handkerchief.

Miss Hornblower looked on Tod with favour after that stout proof of his devotion. He fought three more boys in the next ten days, vanquished them, and was vexed by no more rivals.

Giggles allowed him to buy her a little German-silver ring and to put it on her third finger.

“You’re mine, you know, now,” said Tod, “mine—for ever and ever.”

Chapter Five

Tod held his place as Miss Millie Hornblower’s devoted knight and servant till the coming of the summer holidays brought him an unexpected rival. Tod was not a greedy boy; he never had much pocket-money, and he had failed to understand the secret worldliness of his enchantress’s affection. He gave her himself when she sometimes had a desire for caramels and chocolate creams. She liked looking at the tarts and pinky iced things in the pastrycook’s shop, but Tod was no plutocrat and he rated her soul above jam puffs and penny ices. He once had brought her a paper bag full of raspberries from his mother’s garden, but Giggles had turned up her nose at them.

“Raspberries are nasty, grubby things.”

And Tod had felt hurt.

The summer holidays brought Sydney Plumpton back to Pentworth from some superior sort of school where they had a sixth form and Olympian young men who were called Prefects. Sydney Plumpton was a true son of his father, a heavy, silent, boorish animal with a big wet mouth, staring eyes, and sandy hair. He walked about Pentworth with his hands in his pockets, a tuft of hair sticking out under the peak of his cap, and he never lacked sixpences or something to suck. Chipperton’s thought him a very great man. He talked about his school’s footer team, how he was going to get his “cap,” also a scholarship at one of the Cambridge colleges. He hinted, too, that his house-master’s daughter was always wanting him to kiss her, and that she gave him her father’s cigarettes to smoke.

This Plumpton boy happened upon Miss Hornblower somewhere in Pentworth. He was new and he wore a stand-up collar, and carried a little stick. Miss Hornblower smiled at him, and Sydney Plumpton thought her “the stuff.”

They happened on each another day when young Plumpton was buying sixpennyworth of chocolate creams at Mrs. Clutterbuck’s sweetshop. Miss Hornblower was impressed. This young man could spend money.

Sydney Plumpton waited for her outside the shop.

“Come for a walk,” he said with the air of the master.

Giggles went with him, the sexed thing acknowledging its lord.

Tod became aware of a chilliness during the next ten days. Millie grew sarcastic and patronising and talked over his head of the things real men did when they entertained a lady, yet Tod had no suspicions till he met her one evening with Sydney Plumpton. They were eating sweets out of a bag.

Tod was thunderstruck. He had always hated young Plumpton, partly because he was his father’s son, but his hatred blazed with double strength because of this treachery. He sensed it at once as treachery, from the way Giggles looked at him.

The place of the meeting was the path at the foot of the Castle Mound. The mound was planted with trees, and there was an open space at the top where lovers used to sit. Tod jerked a thumb in the direction of the mound.

“Come up there and be licked,” he said to Sydney Plumpton.

They went up and found the place deserted. Millie Hornblower accompanied them. She had no prejudice against gladiatorial shows, especially when they were in her honour, though she protested half-heartedly.

“You mustn’t fight. It isn’t nice or gentlemanly. What a nasty temper you have, Tod Western. Mr. Plumpton hasn’t done anything to you.”

Tod gave her a blank and tragic look. Did women forget so quickly?

Now young Plumpton was two years older than Tod, a good head taller, and very heavy and strong. He did not take the affair very seriously until he felt Tod in action, and saw the determination in the smaller boy’s eyes. They fought for a full ten minutes, savagely, stubbornly, till they were both so done that their attempts to punch were ludicrous. Tod’s right eye was bulging and his lip was cut, but he had marked young Plumpton’s left eye for him and given him a bloody nose. Both boys were dead pale, panting, unsteady on their feet, when two men pushed through the trees and stopped the fight.

“Well fought, little ’un.”

“Why don’t you take on one of your own size, Fatty?”

“I’ve got to beat him,” said Tod, holding himself up by the man’s arm.

“So you have, old sport. He’s hooking it; he’s had enough.”

“Rot; I let him down easy,” said Sydney Plumpton thickly. “Come on, Giggles.”

Then that most amazing thing happened, for Miss Hornblower, who had been eating young Plumpton’s sweets, hooked an arm in his and offered him her handkerchief.

“Little savage,” she said, looking destroyingly at Tod; “he never had any manners.”

Tod stared after them, with his romantic world toppling into ruins.

“But she’s got my ring,” he said aloud.

“No, I haven’t,” retorted the voice of the lady tartly. “Cheap German silver! Sydney’s bought me a real gold one.”

Tod was a sensitive child, and he took that little tragedy of his greatly to heart, never having heard as yet of a thing called cynicism. He was humiliated, bewildered, and unable to rid himself of the belief that this trashy little yellow-haired chit with her middle-class greed and cunning was really something fine and wonderful. Those words of hers about “German silver” had reduced Tod to horrid shame. The sensitive and generous nature is always at the mercy of a bold and ingenious egotism. The girl had thought him mean, and Tod looked for the blemish in himself. Perhaps he was mean, naturally mean like Uncle Remus. He remembered the incident of the raspberries, and saw himself as a mean little boy whom no girl could love.

Tod waited till it was dusk before returning to Spaniards Row. He had a horror of meeting anyone, even his mother; he wanted to get into some lonely corner and lick himself clean like a dog. He felt that everybody would be laughing at him and saying, “There’s mean little Tod Western who gave a girl a German-silver ring.”

He sneaked in by the garden door, and, of course, fell straight into the arms of his mother, who was lighting the lamp in the passage.

“Oh, Tod!”

“It’s all right, Mother.”

“But your poor eye and lip, dear.”

“I’ve had a bit of a fight,” said Tod, “but I gave the other chap much what he gave me.”

“And what were you fighting about?”

Tod looked embarrassed, abashed, and thoroughly miserable. He had never told his mother about Millie Hornblower, and he did not mean to tell her now.

“Oh, just a row with Sydney Plumpton.”

“That big boy! Why he is two years older than you are, Tod, dear. Come and let me bathe that poor lip. Was young Plumpton trying to bully you?”

“Bully me! It was an affair of honour,” said Tod with dignity.

“I see,” said Nancy Western.

She did not catechise her boy, but took him to her own room, and made a sweet fuss of him, and in the end Tod told her everything. He was very solemn and serious about it, and his mother’s heart went out to him. She happened to know more about Miss Hornblower than Tod imagined.

“I like my boy to be brave and honourable,” she told him. “But Tod, dear, lots of little girls, and women too, are just vain and greedy. They want presents and flattery out of men, and nothing else.”

“I’ve done with girls,” said Tod gravely, “and I don’t want to read any more of those silly books.”

He meditated, while his mother combed his hair.

“Suppose there are girls who grow up to be like you, Mummy?” he asked her suddenly.

“Like me, Tod?”

“Yes. You’re the most wonderful woman in the world, Mummy.”

She kissed him.

“Oh, my dear, I’m not; I loved your father very much, and I love you. That’s all. But I want you, Tod, I want you more than you think. You’re the one thing I have got in the world.”

Tod turned and looked at her with a sudden shine in his eyes.

“What a silly ass I’ve been! There’s no one I love like you, and no one so pretty as you.”

“I shan’t be pretty long, Tod.”

“Yes, you will, always and always.”

She sat down suddenly on the old sofa and put an arm round him. Her face had grown very serious and sad.

“I’ve got to tell you, Tod, dear. I haven’t been very well for quite a long time. I didn’t tell you before——”

Tod’s eyes had grown big and questioning. He looked at his mother as he had never looked at her before. There was fear in him, a great tenderness, an accusing selfscorn, a sudden throwing back of his memory to moments when he had been conscious of his mother as seeming thinner and paler than of yore.

“Mummy, you are not ill?”

“I don’t quite know yet, dear, and the doctor isn’t quite sure either. But I’m not so strong as I was, and I get a silly, tired feeling.”

The memory of Millie Hornblower became blotted utterly out of Tod’s mind. He knelt on the sofa, and put his arms round Nancy Western’s neck.

“I’ve got to leave school,” he said.

“No, dear, I want you to learn all you can.”

“Well, I’ll learn,” he said almost fiercely—“I’ll learn everything. But I’m going to work in the shop, too, and I’m going to take care of you, and you’re going to do nothing at all.”

“Tod——”

“And we’ll go to picnics, and I’ll carry everything. And if you get tired, Mummy, we’ll have a bath-chair like Mrs. Furnival’s and I’ll wheel you about.”

Her eyes filled with tears.

“Dear God,” she said, “you have given me all that I asked for.”

That was the beginning of a new season in Tod’s life, perhaps the most beautiful, the saddest and the most significant season of them all. His mother had not spoken to him without good cause. She was a sick woman, and before three months had passed a doomed woman, a woman with youth in her heart and death in her body.

Tod nursed her, at least he called it nursing her, though it was more like the mingled love of a child and a man than the carefulness of a nurse. He brought her her tea in the morning, carried up her breakfast, and then dashed off to school where he tried to work as she wanted him to work, though his thoughts were in Spaniards Row. He dashed home again, tenderly irrepressible, and did all sorts of things without being told or prompted. There were flowers in her room, and Tod put them there. Once or twice she had asked him for the cut glass scent-bottle on the dressing-table, and he saved up his pocket-money and bought her scent. He interviewed Mr. Chipperton and asked to be excused homework, explaining the situation with a simplicity and a frankness that touched even that dusty pedant.

“Certainly, Western, certainly. I most thoroughly approve of your—your devotion, sir.”

But Tod was at his greatest when he waylaid the doctor, and talked to him with the anxious gravity of a father of a family.

“How is my mother to-day, sir, please?”

“Much the same, Tod, I’m afraid.”

“What about a bath-chair, sir? You would recommend fresh air?”

“Certainly, Tod. I think I can get you the loan of a chair.”

Dr. Vance went out into Spaniards Row and swore at nothing in particular.

“Wish I had a boy like that,” he said.

But he was so conscious of Tod that he found time to be worried, and he had to speak of it to Tod’s mother.

“That boy of yours is a trump,” he said, sitting on the chair beside the bed and looking thoroughly uncomfortable.

Nancy Western answered him with a strange question.

“How long am I going to live? I want you to tell me the truth.”

The doctor felt in all his pockets, scratched his cheek with his forefinger, and then looked her straight in the eyes.

“About four months, I should say.”

“Thank you,” she said; “I must tell him.”

She told Tod that evening when it was getting dusk, making him lie curled on the bed beside her, with his head on the pillow. And Tod did not weep just then. He lay very still, fists clenched, face all screwed up, his heart full of a bitter wailing that something told him had to be suppressed.

“I’ve got to be a man—I’ve got to be a man.”

And a man he was and far bigger-hearted and finer than most, fighting that chocking anguish in his throat and that sense of hopelessness and bewildering desolation.

“Oh, Mummy, why must God take you away? I won’t be selfish. It’s Daddy that wants you.”

She was heartbroken when she thought of her boy alone, left to the negative kindness of Uncle Remus. She was dying ten years too soon, just when she could have done so much. The business was breaking up, and Tod’s home was going with it. In another ten years she could have seen him settled in Pentworth, or realised those other ambitions that had been so dear to her mother’s soul.

“Uncle Remus will give you a home, dear,” she said; “I have spoken to him about it.”

Tod did not want to go to Uncle Remus, but he managed to blurt out: “It will be jolly on the farm.”

Tod wept his soul out that night when he was alone in his room. His child’s anguish was so clean and poignant that its wet eyes could see nothing in the future but desperate and utter loneliness. There were moments when he rebelled, and stood in his white nightshirt at his window, and flourished a fist at the stars.

“God, you mustn’t take Mother away. If you’re a good God you’ll let Dr. Vance make her well.”

But God faded very much out of Tod’s life during those next weeks when his mother began to suffer exquisite pain. The boy’s heart cried out for tangible help, and in his queer, frank way he renounced a shadowy benignant divinity whom nobody had ever seen and who appeared to be of no use in those hours of bitter anguish. Dr. Vance became Tod’s god, quiet, inarticulate, brown-faced Dr. Vance, with his little syringe and bottle of blessed balm. Tod utterly refused to go to school. They could hardly get him out of the house, and if morphia soothed Nancy Western’s body it was Tod that soothed her soul.

He managed to blind himself to the future by throwing himself with wild tenderness into the present. Sickness, especially mortal sickness, can be very wearying and repulsive, but Tod was never tired, and there was no flinching in his eyes. He washed his mother’s face for her, and brushed her hair, fed her, tidied the bed, fetched and carried, read to her, kept the fire bright, or sat and held her hand.

“That there boy’s a marvel,” said Mrs. Bunce; “ ’e’s better than any husband.”

The most vivid memory of Tod’s life was the memory of the night when his mother died. It had been morphia and always morphia. She was thin, horribly thin, and white as linen. Her lips were dry and pale. She could hardly swallow a teaspoonful of milk, or move herself in bed.

It was winter, and Tod had slipped out and bought a tin of peaches. He had two of them all soft and juicy ready in a saucer.

“Tod——”

Her voice was a mere whisper. Tod was with her instantly.

“Tod, you’ve made me so happy, you and your dear daddy.”

Tod held her hand.

“I’ve been so proud, Tod. You are going to be a fine man like your father.”

“I’ll be a fine man, a great man—for you, Mummy,” said Tod with a gulp.

She lay silent awhile, and then spoke, with a faint wail in her voice, after a spasm of pain.

“Oh, I’m so thirsty.”

Tod went for the peaches, and, kneeling on the bed, and supporting her with one hand, fed her with a spoon. She took the fruit almost eagerly and with a kind of pathetic pleasure.

“That was good, Tod.”

Then she lay quiet again. It was growing dusk, and there was no light in the room save the light of the fire.

Suddenly she spoke again.

“Tod.”

“Mummy.”

“Come here and hold my hand.”

He snuggled near her. She was on the edge of the great abyss, but he did not realise it.

“Tod, never marry—till you have been in love ten times.”

“I shan’t marry—never,” he said, “unless I find somebody like you.”

She made a queer little sound, something between a sigh and a laugh, and lay there holding his hand.

It was about midnight when Mrs. Bunce, keeping vigil by the kitchen fire, heard that wailing in the room above.

“Dear God,” said she, starting up, “the poor dear’s dead! God save us, but what am I to do for that boy?”

Chapter Six

Tod was nearly fifteen when his mother died, and he was destined to spend two years under the control of the negative virtues of Uncle Remus.

Nancy Western left her boy the £1,000 she had inherited, the “business” and the furniture. The £1,000 was safe enough, invested in those two mortgages; and Uncle Remus, left sole trustee until Tod was twenty-one, had a solid faith in mortgages. The “business” and the furniture proved to be very liquid assets, so liquid that the “business” ran away through Uncle Remus’s fingers.

The commercial spirit of Pentworth was responsible for this liquefaction.

Mr. Plumpton happened to have an energetic young nephew who was a photographer’s assistant at Shaston-on-Sea, and about six months before Nancy Western’s death Mr. Plumpton sent for that young man and offered to lend him a hundred pounds.

“Look here, Gus; the woman’s done for. There’s no need to make her an offer. Set up yourself, and you’ll collar the whole business, without paying a farthing. When she’s dead, there’ll be a sale.”

“And I can nip in and buy as much of the stuff as I want.”

“Cheap, dirt cheap,” said Mr. Plumpton, remembering a certain scene in Nancy Western’s house.

That was Pentworth’s idea of commercial morality, but in those days Tod knew nothing of the Pentworths of England.

The sale of the Westerns’ furniture and shop fittings at No. 13 Spaniards Row left Tod with a few of his father’s books and a little cane chair that had belonged to his mother. Tod did not go to the sale; he was resentful and glum about it, yet conscious in a vague way that he was up against a force that was stronger than his boy’s sentiments.

“You’ve got to have two years more schooling,” said Uncle Remus, “your mother left it written down. Schooling’s got to be paid for.”

Tod supposed that it had.

Pentworth excelled itself over that sale. It sniffed, and fingered and sneered, turned the home of the dead Westerns upside down, and snapped up “bargains.” It was a day of bargains. Mrs. Bunce, who was a sentimental sort of creature, followed the sale through the first half of the catalogue and then pushed her way out into the street.

“Downright robbery, that’s what it is,” she said to a neighbour, “robbin’ that boy. And all the poor soul’s things being treated like rubbish.”

Mr. Plumpton’s nephew bought the shop fittings and the outfit of the studio at a very successful figure.

“Smart bit of biz, that!”

Ten years later someone else played the same trick on him, and he asked if it was “a Christian country.”

No. 13 Spaniards Row ceased to be a little corner of romance. Tod could never bring himself to go near the house. He tried it but once, and came by such a lump in his throat and such a misery of loneliness that Spaniards Row became for him no more than a thing of dreams. He continued at Chipperton’s as in-boy, living in Mr. Chipperton’s house, and learning to connect Miss Victoria Chipperton with underdone beef and pickled cabbage. Tod was never a great desk boy, and he hated church and the Friday evening hymns almost as much as he hated Miss Chipperton. He learnt his arithmetic and how to spell; picked up some dud-Latin and a few oddments of algebra; struck queer, disjointed patches of English history and remembered a few battles, but little else. He could draw, and he absorbed some elementary science which the third master threw at the science class twice a week in a desultory sort of way. But most of his activities were of the open air. He was the best bat in the school, and he knew more about birds and trees and wild things than any other boys at Chipperton’s. As for girls, he had no use for them at all, which made him rather attractive.

His holidays were spent with Uncle Remus at Burnt Farm, a thoroughly hideous brick-and-slate house that stood up mournfully on a bare hillside. Uncle Remus was all for the practical side of life. He believed in corrugated iron and barbed wire, dirty clothes and clean land. There were no pigeon-pie, cheese-cake, strawberry-and-cream touches about Uncle Remus’s farming. He kept a housekeeper and one strong girl, and the housekeeper saw to it that Tod did not fraternise with the food in the larder. She was a very tall woman with great bony hips, a flat chest and a little dab of nose that always looked blue in winter. Tod used to fancy that she must pull herself out of bed by her own hair, so tight and thin was it. The “strong girl” was a hoyden who was always trying to make Tod wrestle, till a new ploughman came along and married her.

Tod did not love Burnt Farm. It was dreary and penurious and isolated, and Uncle Remus used to put down seed in winter and shoot the birds.

“Darned little thieves,” he called them.

Uncle Remus shot everything; especially if it could be sold or eaten. When it was cheaper to trap he trapped, using the steel trap, and this economy of his led to a row with Tod. For Tod found a rabbit in a steel trap one morning, down by the ash wood, and after that all Uncle Remus’s steel traps were missing. Tod had collected them and thrown the lot into the cow-pond.

He avowed it openly and with anger, and Uncle Remus made an unsuccessful attempt to whack him.

“You young varmint——”

“Don’t you touch me.”

“What did you do it for—jus’ mischief?”

“How’d you like to be in a trap?”

Uncle Remus stared, and his lower lip hung down.

“We’ll never make a farmer of you, my boy.”

“I’m not going to be a farmer. I’m going to be a doctor, and mend things.”

Uncle Remus gave one of his rare laughs.

“Start on your manners, young man. You a doctor! Why, Chipperton says you’re a blockhead.”

“I’m not a blockhead,” said Tod fiercely. “Old Chipperton’s a fool.”

At the end of two years Uncle Remus began to think that it was high time Tod should earn some money. He was fond of the boy in a queer, grudging, cold-blooded way, but the little bit of gold exercised a wonderful fascination over Tod’s uncle. He would spend hours at night, sitting smoking in his old arm-chair, scribbling figures on the backs of old envelopes and making eternal calculations. It was Uncle Remus’s great game, the great game of profit and loss, turnips and haystacks reduced to the last halfpenny.

“Time a big boy like you was getting to work.”

“I want to be a doctor,” said Tod.

“And where’s the money to come from?”

“There’s the money Mother left me.”

Uncle Remus gave a sardonic grin.

“That won’t be touched so long as I have a say in it. Two good solid mortgages. Capital ain’t come by every day of the week.”

He was adamant, nor could Tod move him for a moment. Yet the boy was so obstinate that the old man took the trouble to drive over to Pentworth and get himself supported by private interviews with Dr. Vance and Mr. Chipperton.

He came back very well satisfied.

“About this doctoring idea, young man. How long do you think it takes to learn the trade?”

“I don’t know.”

“Five years. Vance says it would cost the best part of a thousand pounds to do it well. And at the end of it you might earn a hundred and fifty pounds and your keep. That’s a monkey’s game. Besides—you ain’t got the head for it.”

“Who says so?”

“Chipperton. Says you’re a good boy, but you’d never pass the exams. Money wasted. You listen to me, Tod my boy; business is the thing. There’s money in a shop—not every sort of shop of course—specially if you’ve got grit and a little capital. You drop all that black-coat nonsense. What’s a black coat against ten thousand pounds in good securities? It’s money that counts.”

Tod had no answer to give to his uncle’s shrewd materialism, no answer that mattered. Uncle Remus’s opposition was too solid. No money would be available till Tod was twenty-one, and as the farmer put it: “A young man can’t loaf for five years.” Moreover, Tod had felt discouraged by Mr. Chipperton’s scepticism with regard to those exams. Tod still had some faith in Mr. Chipperton’s intellect, if he had no belief in him as a cricketer, and Tod was a sensitive boy in spite of all his sturdiness. A sense of adventure was stirring in him; Chipperton’s school and Burnt Farm were like sucked eggs.

About that time Uncle Remus brought off one of his diplomatic triumphs; that is to say, he dispossessed himself of a responsibility without parting with any time or money. He had a friend at Shaston-on-Sea, a Mr. Eli Flowerdew who traded in second-hand furniture, books, pictures and antiques, no hole-and-corner business, mind you, but a two-fronted shop in Ponsonby Place, a big warehouse, and a reputation. Old Flowerdew and Uncle Remus had been at school together, and Eli Flowerdew was a “warm man,” a man with a fine scent for a bargain.

It happened, too, that Uncle Remus was in a position to oblige Mr. Flowerdew. The reason seemed trivial enough; it would have sounded meaningless to Tod. His uncle had a fine set of old English pewter, chargers, plates, ewers, all marked with the mark of a rather famous pewterer, and Mr. Flowerdew needed that set. He needed it so badly that he drove over one day in a gig from Shaston and tried to persuade Remus to sell.

Tod’s uncle “went to market.” He had an idea in his shrewd noddle, and if he obliged Eli Flowerdew, Mr. Flowerdew should oblige him. He pretended to be very unwilling to sell that pewter, paraded a quite unexpected and sentimental pride in it, and boasted of the fact that he did not want the money.

“It belonged to my grandfather,” he kept repeating; “Ol’ George Barter, who was the best judge of a bullock this side o’ the Downs.”

Mr. Flowerdew persisted.

“Look here, Remus, this isn’t a matter of one bit of business to me. I have struck a new client, a wealthy and eccentric sort of fish who’ll bite at anything old. He’s mad on pewter, and this is the first bait. I can make hundreds out of him if I get him on the hook, and this pewter of yours would do it.”

“Oh, that’s it, is it,” said Uncle Remus. He puffed at his pipe, and refilled Mr. Flowerdew’s glass.

“Money ain’t everything,” he said benignantly. “We’ve been friends these forty years. Yet I’ve a sort of kind feeling for that pewter.”

The dealer in antiques played sentiment against sentiment.

“That’s true. Anything I can do for you, old man?”

Uncle Remus appeared to search for the thought of something that he needed.

“No, not as I knows of.”

“Don’t want a bit of furniture?”

“No.”

“Wish I was as contented.”

Uncle Remus smiled like the beautiful and simple old peasant of some sentimental story. Life was complete; there was nothing on earth that he greedily desired. And then he removed his pipe from his mouth, pointed the stem at Mr. Flowerdew, and sat up in his chair.

“Hold on. Why, I never thought o’ that before! You’re a man of influence, Eli; that’s a fine business of yours, and it’s going to be finer. You don’t want a lad in your shop, do you?”